Biz Stone’s Jelly App Is More Ambitious Than It Seems

“Maybe we can nudge the global-empathy quotient up just enough so that we can get to this aspirational vision of the future that Gene Roddenberry created when he wrote Star Trek: mankind united as one and as citizens of the earth.”

VF Daily was conversing with Biz Stone, erstwhile Twitter executive (and Twitter co-founder) about his new project, Jelly. The month-old search app answers user’s questions by crowd-sourcing a query out to other users and waiting for responses. We must admit, when we first read about—and then downloaded and tested—the app we were a bit skeptical. “Can’t Google do this?” But in fact the function is different (you can’t take a picture of a Ficus plant and ask Google what it is) and Stone was emphatic.

“You know, technology companies always like to talk about Star Trek—like the future of search is Star Trek because on the Starship Enterprise you just talk into the computer and it understands you. And I’m like: You’re skipping over all the other part of Roddenberry’s thing! Where mankind had eliminated poverty, disease, hunger! You’re just skipping it! You can’t skip that!”

How do you get from a new search engine to eliminating hunger? Well, by encouraging people to be empathetic, maybe. And by thinking big, definitely.

So why did Stone build Jelly? Wasn’t he looking to get out of a full-time entrepreneur roll? Yes, he was. Stone told us the idea grew accidentally out of a conversation with Jelly co-founder Ben Finkel. “We were walking around and this weird idea popped into my head. I said: ‘What if we had to build a search engine, you and me?’ I have no computer-science background. And he’s a computer-science genius, but not an information-retrieval genius. I said: ‘Not in 1998 or 1999, and not, necessarily, even the Internet. Not this vast collection of published documents, but a thing, a service, that could answer any question.”

The key difference between now and 1999 is that now a vast percentage of the global population has a mobile device, and because humans are linked to one another through their devices, Stone explained, there’s a very good chance someone you know, or someone who knows someone you know, has the answer to a question. Stone used ants to further describe Jelly’s basic assumption, “sometimes there’s a whole greater than the sum of its parts, like an ant colony can be genius, while an individual ant is an idiot, right?”

So he started pitching the idea to people he respects, including Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey, and the response was positive. “They were like, ‘Oh, my God that’s such a great idea. And it’s so you.’” To hear Stone tell it, this was terrible. “I was thinking ‘Oh, God, now I have to do this.’ And so I felt sick, I felt nauseous. I was like ‘I can’t believe I left Twitter, to like take a break and everything, and now I’m gonna start all over again. And it’s probably not gonna work.’”

When asked to think big (as if he needs encouragement) about what the implications could be if the app doesn’t in fact fail, Stone muses about a shift in search. Google, after all, took a few years to take off and take over. “Well, we could be one of the world’s big search engines. We could—I mean, this is the super cheesy thing, where I say this and Silicon Valley blogger people roll their eyes—the undercurrent, the double-bottom-line aspect of what we’re doing is what really gets me excited. Because if we are successful, for instance, if we become as successful as Twitter, or something like that, then what we’re gonna do is introduce into the daily muscle memory of hundreds of millions of people this idea of: Can I help someone else right now?” He continues, “Just empathy. We’re gonna introduce the idea of “I could look at a bunch of filtered photos, or little videos or tweets, or I could help someone. Everyone wants to help someone.”

All of this talk of empathy had reminded us of another Biz Stone venture, Beyond Meat, a 2 year-old company that aims to create the most believable imitation meat (Stone sits on the board). We asked him about the project’s idealist goals. “You can’t feed 7 billion people the way that wealthy Americans eat. It doesn’t work. You can’t grow cows and chickens and feed 7 billion people.”

“I’m involved for compassion reasons” continues Stone, “but other people could get excited for sustainability, for all kinds of other reasons, for environmentalism…” there’s massive market potential, we crassly point out, since he’s mentioned everything but the multi-billion-dollar food industry. He nods, citing investment on the part of a certain well-financed Microsoft executive. All these big ideas are pretty exciting for Stone, “I mean, we’re gonna feed China. We’re gonna feed China!”